The Martian: Ridley Lite

If you’ve been following my blog for a while you know I am a fan of Ridley Scott. (See posts: The Insightful World of Ridley Scott – 4/13, No Two Replicants- 5/13). There are therefore few Ridley Scott movies that I do not like (The Counselor, GI Jane), but I do recognize that even within the well made films he has two styles, which I will call Ridley Deep and Ridley Lite. I like both, don’t get me wrong, but obviously prefer the former. The Martian, the movie that opened in theaters yesterday, is Ridley Lite.

By now it’s clear that a genre Scott dominates is science fiction, and Blade Runner and Alien are the jewels in his crown in that field. Those two, along with Prometheus (the Alien prequel or sequel, nobody is quite sure which), are Ridley Deep. They are deep because the magnificently depicted future and story line is not flat and acts mainly as a setting to have us reflect upon the ways of us humans within this little planet called Earth, a speck in the universe.

Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) in Blade Runner

In Blade Runner the meditation is around technology and our relationship with the machines we create “in our own image” (there’s a divinity theme there, frequent in Scott’s movies) and perfect to the point that they become independent of us and, ultimately, turn on us. But there is more. It is also about the limits of our humanity. When the replicant Roy Batty gives his beautiful Tears in the Rain speech at the end of the movie (“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it?”), after demonstrating the depths of his humanity, we’re thrown into a whirlwind of thought about the things we create and destroy, the extent of our feelings for others, the world we were given and have gone through with such disdain.

Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and cat in Alien

Alien pits humans, a woman this time, against a being that has possibly been engendered as a weapon by those “God-like” creatures we see in Prometheus. This is the weapon that the humans in the corporation behind the Nostromo want the crew to bring back to Earth. As Ash, the android on board the ship, so aptly states: “The Alien is a perfect organism. Superbly structured, cunning, quintessentially violent (…) How can one not admire perfection.” The value of human life for corporate greed could be one way to put the theme behind the movie. It’s also somewhat present in Blade Runner, where the Tyrel Corporation has created the replicants for profit. Again we are looking at the limits or boundaries of our humanity. And it is ultimately the woman –a gender much disdained in our world- who faces the Alien. She says: “This is Ripley,W564502460H, executive officer, last survivor of the commercial starship Nostromo signing off (…)Come on cat.”

Matt Damon in The Martian

And then there is The Martian, much closer to the present than the other futuristic movies, about a NASA mission to Mars; no corporations this time, although in real life there is already a private company looking into getting people to Mars. It’s hard to find a deeper theme here than the story line itself, basically a space Robinson Crusoe. Could it be that we’re to reflect on whether the NASA program should be continued? Maybe a lesson in how  one life is worth the billion dollars it takes to save it? Maybe that Mars is really not quite that uninhabitable and should be the next planet to colonize? That’s already a given, more so now, with those photos of liquid water sent from Mars.

Even so, it is a movie worth watching, because nobody does science fiction like Ridley Scott. The panoramic views of Mars, like the awe inspiring opening views in Prometheus, the detail with which technology is presented, the FX, the cinematography, set design, acting, score and more; everything so carefully executed. Matt Damon is great in the movie and totally outperforms the other actors in the movie and leads it, sort of like Sigourney Weaver did in Alien. It is about a man’s will to survive and also our scientific minds. But it’s still lite because this is as far as it goes and because it has such a good-feely sentiment to it, kind of like a better Armageddon.

The Aries space craft in The Martian

It is also, curiously, a little bit careless in its science. Not to the point of Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, with its Wall-E-like fire extinguisher scene, but it does kind of melt down towards the end. For example, the story probably takes place in the not too distant future, but still probably no earlier than 2080, given that it’s estimated we could send a small human mission to Mars around 2030, but it will probably take longer to develop the Aries IV space ship we see in the Martian.  So about 80 years into the future, yet everybody on Earth is totally 2015. Then there is the pretty well known fact (it’s been on NPR) that a lot of the equipment needed for a human mission to Mars has already been developed, including the MOXIE, the machine that separates the Hydrogen from the Oxygen. So scenes like the one where Matt Damon blows himself up trying to do just that is something baffling. We also know quite a lot about Mars, for example the gravity (62% lower), the radiation a person would suffer on Mars (forcing humans to have to live underground), and more.  A lot of which is omitted in the movie. The implausibility of the final rescue scene is well within Gravity sloppiness.

Space rescue in The Martian

Ridley Lite is still Ridley Scott, which is to say he’s still way better than most directors. So enjoy. The Martian is a movie that will keep you in your seat, eyes glued to the screen, rooting for the man everyone wants to bring home. It is a movie that fills you with a warm feeling about the strength of the human spirit and the power of the human mind, in particular when it decides to "science the hell" out of things.

Rising From the Ashes

 

    

Summer can be the perfect time for a hiatus from a movie blog. It’s the time of year for the film industry to make the big dollars that company stockholders are expecting, so it’s blockbuster season. A rather arid time for lovers of film as art. However, my hiatus has been only in part been due to this. I’ve also been on vacation and away from movie screens, as much as that has been hard to do.

I wasn’t completely gone.  I did treat myself to some very excellent documentaries, in particular The Wolf Pack and Amy, which I comment in the Fresh Cuts section of this blog (I reiterate my invitation to click the Fresh Cuts tab to see ratings and short comments on all the films I see).

 I also saw the blockbusters that got the good reviews, in particular Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and Man from UNCLE. I reveal my age by telling you that I enjoyed watching Mission Impossible and Man from UNCLE as TV shows, when I was a child; this makes it just that much more fun to show up for these–so much better – film versions of the shows.

The fifth installment of Mission Impossible did not disappoint. Tom Cruise is certainly committed to his work and the airplane lift-off scene, where he didn’t use a double or green screen, is truly worthy of applause, as is the motorcycle chase scene in the movie (amazing editing!). It’s a very fun film to watch, which I know is what Cruise was going for and what he’s best at. 

Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

Man from UNCLE has director Guy Richie’s style, established with his two Sherlock Holmes films, which is to say it is also a fun movie worth paying to see. The beautiful Alicia Vikander, of A Royal Affair stature, made more famous by Ex-Machina this year, delivers her charm in the movie, and entices in her cold war relationship with Arnie Hammer, one of the two very good looking leading men of this first in what promises to be a film series. Television on the big screen.

Arnie Hammer, Alicia Vikander and Henry Cavill in Man from UNCLE

All said, it was the American July release of the German movie Phoenix that really rose above all other as the must see movie of the year for me… so far (fall begins). The director is renowned German director Christian Petzold (Barbara) who again works with the amazing Nina Hoss (Barbara, A Most Wanted Man) in a movie about the enduring trauma of the holocaust in post war Germany. The movie takes place immediately after the fall of the Third Reich, as we see in the opening scene where American soldiers stop a car travelling with two holocaust survivors in Germany: Nelly (Hoss) and Lene (Nina Kunzendorf). Nelly bears the scars of the war both internally and externally, requiring plastic surgery, and Lene, the one person that truly loves Nelly, bears profound scars internally and quietly. They look to each other for emotional survival after the colossal trauma of what each has lost and suffered, but Nelly’s husband Johnny is still alive and with him some unbearable secrets. The movie has most definite resonances of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, as Nelly and her husband Johnny begin to weave a fascinating and lethal web of deceit.

Nina Hoss and Nina Kunzendorf in Phoenix

The acting in the movie is superb, as is the story-telling. There is a little of film noir and a lot of that dark feeling around this time period that is so well conveyed by European films. European film makers, without necessarily using explicit and graphic scenes of the horror of the Holocaust, are able to express such horror with truly creative subtlety. This film now joins such great films of this sub-genre, like Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s Das Schlangenei (The Serpent’s Egg), or Hungarian director István Szabó’s Mephisto. It is a story about the nature of human beings in times of extreme tribulations and what we are willing to endure and forgive, because of love; how we are also able to betray and destroy; and, ultimately, how we can regenerate, like the mythological Phoenix, and rise from the ashes or our lives, again and again. 

Teach Your Children Well

There is one territory that humans are only at the brink of uncovering: our brain. The fascinating to the point of magical world of the brain and mental health is yet to be well understood and our studies are really in their infancy. But we have made progress, definitively moving away from the psychoanalytic couch into a sphere where we’ll be using the tools of genomics, neuroscience, and exposomics to forge ahead in our knowledge; and it seems we’re letting the kids (and their parents too) in on some of the its neat workings in this wild ride of a movie, Inside Out, that is Disney Pixar’s digitally animated incursion into Riley’s brain!

Amy Poehler as Joy

Not only does Inside Out present children with a fascinating view of some of the mechanisms and complexities of our brains (yes, a movie that actually gets kids to think about something), but it does so in such a dynamic and creative way, and with such rounded out and developed characters, that it completely engages the viewer emotionally. That’s a lot to say, especially when the characters are supposedly one-dimensional emotions: joy, sadness, disgust, fear and anger. The movie is a feat of writing, animation and also voice acting. I have to stop here and give a loud cheer for the amazing Amy Poehler and how incredible she is as the voice of Joy! Truly, what a joy she is! What a way to give life to an animated character! All the voice casting is wonderful in this film, to tell the truth, which just makes Amy’s art all the more impressive. Richard Kind is tearfully great as Bing Bong, Riley’s imaginary friend, Phyllis Smith plays sadness, Bill Hader is fear, Lewis Black anger and Mindy Kailing disgust. Perfect casting!

Minnesota born Director Peter Docter, of Up and Monster’s Inc. stature, in collaboration with Philippine art director Ronaldo Del Carmen, have made a movie that lifts us out of the theatre and takes us on an emotional roller coaster ride into the brain and emotions of its main protagonist, eleven year old Riley who has been uprooted from her life in Minnesota and taken to San Francisco, where her dad has moved to pursue his career.  Simple enough, except for the changes that this event and her growing up mean to her brain.

Richard Kind as Bing Bong

With this movie Pixar is also taking another step in the right direction of breaking away from the little “boxes” society likes to create around situations and people. It does so by choosing the interesting story line, as we’ve mentioned, but also by finally casting another female lead. Of the fifteen feature films Pixar has released, this is only the second that has a female lead. The other one was Brave. The difference with Brave, however, is that that movie seemed to be set on making a statement about having a female lead, a “hey, Pixar is finally casting a female lead and she’s strong and brave, even though she’s a girl!”. Where as in Inside Out there’s no need for the statement. It’s more natural. The person in whose brain we’re inside just happens to be a girl, a hockey playing, smart and great girl. So in our still quite sexist society, boys / men can feel just at home with the movie as girls have always had to feel with all other Pixar films. Brave, however, still holds the honor of having the only female director a Pixar film has ever had, albeit a co-director. Brenda Chapman, who co-directed Brave, went on to become the first woman to win and Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Inside Out, while not directed by a woman, does have Meg LeFauve as one of the screenplay writers.

So this movie does it right and gets rewarded in the process. Inside Out made over $90 million dollars on its opening weekend, which means, in terms of all 15 of Pixar’s films, that it has only been topped by Toy Story 3. It would not come as a surprise if Amy Poehler received a –well deserved- Academy Award nomination for her voice acting.

What should be most rewarding to the makers of Inside Out, however, is that it is providing a thought provoking, emotionally charged, creative, quality film for children. And this is good. This is, hopefully, a drop in the bucket of helping them be just that much better than their parents. And that's the best thing film can do, teach them well.

This is a Woman!

This is a woman: the intelligence analyst.

This is a woman: the CIA Director.

This is a woman: the head of the organized crime ring.

This is a woman: the field agent that brings her down.

Spy, the movie about these women, comes as a cool breeze in the stale troposphere of male-dominated comedy and action movies! Kudos to self-confessed "feminised geek", writer and director Paul Feig (also of Bridesmaids, The Heat and forthcoming female-cast Ghostbusters). But really this movie would be nothing without the wonderful cast led by the amazing and absolutely delightful Melissa McCarthy and the equally talented Rose Byrne, Miranda Hart and Allison Janney! The cast makes Spy the best comedy I’ve seen in a while and these women prove that comedy is totally a woman’s thing. Feig himself wrote, in a piece entitled “Why Men Aren’t Funny”:

Is modern society now ready to transition away from the Myth of Male Hilarity? After all, today's world has erased most of the survival needs that once required a woman to inflate the comedic self-worth of the men around her. Grocery stores, police departments and in vitro fertilization perform the functions once reserved for her Y-chromosome counterparts. The 21st-century woman is finally free to reveal her comedic superiority and inform her penised inferiors that they will never again be permitted to make that "in my pants" joke.

Rose Byrne and Melissa McCarthy in Spy

To answer Feig’s question, yes, we are more than ready to transition away from the myth and it’s been a long time coming. Frankly, the 3.52 billion women around the world are still patiently, non-riotously, not even in a protesting manner still waiting for equity, so being able to enjoy two hours of great, female-led comedy is water to this equity-thirsty crowd! This movie not only puts women in the front and center, it does so while very beautifully showing the absurdity of sexism. How even in our modern society, even in so called “developed” nations, women are all but invisible to the world unless they are beautiful and fulfill the roles our sexist society assigns them. It is thus that, in the movie, the brilliant analyst that has led the top Bond-like male spy, played by Jude Law, is called a lunch lady and given a rape whistle and hemorrhoid wipes as the, once again, Bond-like gadgets with which to thwart would-be assassins when she’s sent into the field. But with sparkling eyes, brilliant wit, and a dazzling smile, Melissa McCarthy’s Spy breaks that glass and we cheer and laugh her way out of the boxes created for women.

Great combat scene; Melissa McCarthy and Nargis Fakhri in Spy

It’s with a heart full of gratitude that we go to a movie like this, even if it is just a comedy (or maybe because it is). These are discouraging days for women, ones in which conservative men (and some self-hating women) try to take away even basic choices and push women back into nineteenth century situations. These are days where we painfully watch television commercials and shows that we thought, in our youth, would be things of the past in the 21^st century, not ones that glorify the most superficial and antiquated stereotypes about women, popular shows of the most sexist eras like Mad Men, The Astronaut Wives Club, Pan Am, The Playboy Club, to name but a tiny few. 

Melissa McCarthy and action actor Jason Statham in Spy.

These are days where women watch in astonishment how even gay and transgender men are forging ahead on issues of equity and respect at a time when it almost seems women are losing ground in both. (Well, not surprising, really. They are men, after all). With respect to the Supreme Court, for example, and as is stated in an article in the New York Time, Justices’ Rulings Advance Gays; Women Less So:

At the same time [as the gay agenda is advanced], legal scholars say, the [Supreme] court has delivered blows to women’s groups in cases involving equal pay, medical leave, abortion and contraception, culminating in a furious dissent last month from the court’s three female members (…) we live in a society that now seems more receptive to gay rights than women’s rights generally, so it is disheartening but not surprising to see that reflected in decisions like Hobby Lobby, which failed to see the link between contraception access and women’s equality.

More recently, referring to the case of transgender Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn Jenner, the feminist scholar Elinor Burkett writes in another New York Times piece, Do Women and Men Have Different Brains:

I have fought for many of my 68 years against efforts to put women — our brains, our hearts, our bodies, even our moods — into tidy boxes, to reduce us to hoary stereotypes. Suddenly, I find that many of the people I think of as being on my side — people who proudly call themselves progressive and fervently support the human need for self-determination — are buying into the notion that minor differences in male and female brains lead to major forks in the road and that some sort of gendered destiny is encoded in us.

That’s the kind of nonsense that was used to repress women for centuries. But the desire to support people like Ms. Jenner and their journey toward their truest selves has strangely and unwittingly brought it back.

People who haven’t lived their whole lives as women, whether Ms. Jenner or Mr. Summers, shouldn’t get to define us. That’s something men have been doing for much too long. And as much as I recognize and endorse the right of men to throw off the mantle of maleness, they cannot stake their claim to dignity as transgender people by trampling on mine as a woman.

All this is, really, no laughing matter. And yet, there are many ways to erode sexism and, yes, comedy is one of them.

Melisssa McCarthy and Jude Law in Spy.

It is our hope that men who see a movie like Spy will really see these women and observe the spectacle of absurdity that is a sexist man. It is our hope that they may even do a double take and begin to open their eyes to every woman that surrounds them and think: yes, this is a woman, a human, a unique and wonderful individual!

Furiosa Road

More is certainly not better. With just that line I could end the commentary to George Miller’s fourth installment of his Mad Max series: Mad Max, Fury Road. I’m drawn to writing more, however, because so many critics have praised the movie (98% average critics reviews on Rotten Tomatoes) and some have even gone as far as to praise it for its “feminist” slant. This I cannot abide. 

There are so many things wrong with Fury Road that make it, in my opinion, the least of George Miller’s four takes on the Mad Max character. How women are treated in this installment is a big part of what’s wrong. Many –including some sexist male groups- seem to have concentrated on Charlize Theron’s character, Imperator Furiosa, to claim –or protest- the “feminist” angle. Yes, Theron’s character is a smart, strong woman fighting to get back to the home she was taken from as a child and, in doing so, freeing and taking with her the young and beautiful brides held captive by Immortan Joe, the depraved and cruel leader of their post-apocalyptic world. Throughout most of the movie, Theron’s character is the one battling Immortan Joe’s men, carrying Mad Max, played rather mutely by Tom Hardy, rather like an albatross around her neck. The fact that the movie is called Mad Max, Fury Road and not Imperator Furiosa, Fury Road kind of does away with the centrality of her character and, through most of the final half of the movie, Max pretty much takes back his hero stance, shoving Theron into assistant role.

Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa

It’s serves to remember that women were not absent from Miller’s previous Mad Max installments. The character known as Warrior Woman (actress Virginia Hey) is central to Max’s escape in Road Warrior and, what’s more, the community of survivors in that movie was led by Big Rebecca, an older, wise woman who, by the way, was not fat. In Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, installment three of the series, it is a woman who reigns over Bartertown, the last outpost of “civilization”, she was the villain to Mel Gibson’s Max: Aunty Entity played magnificently by Tina Turner.

Virginia Hey as Warrior Woman in Road Warrior

Tina Turner as Aunty Entity in Thunderdome

In Fury Road, what does provoke considerable fury is that there is a group of very fat women, also held captive by the cult leader, who are literally milked, like cows! It is a grotesque scene that totally dehumanizes and reduces women to chattel. Strangely, these much abused women who are the actual mothers in the film (they are the producers of what is called “mother’s milk”) are not the ones rescued by Theron or Hardy. The ones who take up screen time as the damsels in distress are the Victoria’s Secret-like models that the cult leader and all his men are sent chasing to retrieve. Even the plot line is debased this way. In Road Warrior, it was gasoline everyone was after. Here, it’s the pretty women. Even the gray haired women who have survived for years in the desert –though it’s not even hinted how- end up giving up their lives for the beauties.

The early Mad Max movies were made in the eighties. Maybe it’s a sign of our modern times so plagued by misogynist images in violent video games, an explosion of internet pornography that is redefining sex, to the detriment of women, and a continued absence of smart, strong, female lead characters in the movies that makes some people feel that Fury Road is somehow a “feminist” take.

Even beyond that, nothing much works in Fury Road, besides the sometimes overbearing display of CGI.  While some may find the acrobatics and pyrotechnics neat to watch, they also serve to detract from any realism in this film. Road Warrior felt plausible, it had a gritty realism that made that post-apocalyptic world feel real. The story there was also simple and didn’t have the gaping loose ends of Fury Road. Like, for example, the gasoline and bullet reserve town where Furiosa was originally headed but that is never mentioned again. (Who kept manufacturing all the bullets? In Road Warrior, bullets were a scarcity, Max had two). There is no background to Immortar Joe’s cult, to his control over the water, the weird boys, all the people that survive on sand; everything is mixed together and borrowed, very “willy-nilly”, from the previous Mad Max movies. You can tell the producers are betting on viewers being distracted by the visuals and the noise.

And Max. The only thing this movie retains of the original Mad Max character is the title. This movie really should have been called Imperator Furiosa, Fury Road because Mad Max, who is literally mad in it, plagued by hallucinations and terrors, is but a ghost of his former screen self. Tom Hardy may look tough, but he comes off as not only very quiet but also rather unintelligent.

Mel Gibson and Tom Hardy as Mad Max

We don’t really know if Mad Max served to create Mel Gibson’s screen persona or the other way around, but Mel’s Max was a rounded out character. He would never have narrated his own story! He was the legend. He spoke more, to be certain, and, while he appeared ruthless and focused on his own survival, through playing off the Feral Kid and his dog named Dog, we got that he was the unsung hero (until Thunderdome). And even though the Road Warrior was a brutal film -because less can many times be more- Gibson’s Max was still able to convey some humor, completely lost in Hardy’s.

So, yeah, Fury Road is a bigger, louder, better tech movie, with a whopping $150 million dollar budget, compared to Road Warrior’s $3.5 million, but more is certainly not better.

And Imperator Furiosa is still light years away from being Ellen Ripley.

Children’s Tales

Many movies get lost in the world of aggregate ratings. I confess to being one of those moviegoers that checks the percentages critics and the public have given a movie before venturing into the cinema. Movies cost too much not to. But I also make sure to check  how my favorite critics have rated the movie, picking up some insights in the process. I have found, however, that because movies are so personal, you end up going for what you like and the artists you've enjoyed to pick your films. If not, you may miss out on something good. Remember that many great movies were not recognized as such in their time. Here’s a recent example of the need to rely on your taste: the new Disney Cinderella got better reviews than Chappie, the most recent sci-fi by Neill Blomkamp. But I like Blomkamp, so of course I went to see it. I also saw Cinderella. I found the latter a bit  boring (although I suppose many little girls of six to fourteen years of age will disagree), and found Chappie a good futuristic movie… about our times.

The two movies, in their own way, are fairy tales. Both in their own peculiar manner deal with the beautiful spirit we are born with that ends up being crushed by greed, ruthlessness, and a society that prizes those two “qualities” above others.

Dev Patel and Hugh Jackman in Chappie

The audiences for these two films, of course, couldn't be more different, in quite a gendered way.  Cinderella is out to capture the hearts of little girls, who will walk from the movie theatre to the nearest store to dress up in the blue taffeta and blonde curls of the “heroine” of that movie. And it’s really not that difficult to connect with little girls and show them how the good fairy will help the young, kind and beautifully dressed girl succeed, all the while sticking to her motto: “Have Courage and Be Kind”.  But how do you connect on issues of social justice, class warfare, urban degradation, civil unrest and/ or brutal racism to a whole generation of young, white males that have grown up with their thumbs glued to a game controller and their eyes to a screen that sucks them into an alienating virtual reality? One way is to offer them Neill Blomkamp’s films, which they are very likely to want to see, given that they are sci-fi and amazingly stunning in their FX and virtual reality wizardry.

District 9, Elysium and Chappie, by the 36 year old South African Director, make us feel as if we have finally gone back to a time when science fiction films were works of art, philosophy and social analysis, like they once were when 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick: 1968), A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick: 1971), Alien (Scott: 1979) and Blade Runner (Scott: 1982) filled the movie screens. A time before the blockbuster, money producing machine that was the Star Wars franchise broke into the theatres and the aisles of toy stores, spreading pure entertainment, Manichean plots and  a bit of mediocrity.

Chappie is the story of innocence and what happens to it when faced with poverty, marginality and survival. The film is about a police robot (an amazing FX feat), which has been given an operating system so sophisticated that it can actually feel. Yes, Blomkamp is a Ridley Scott fan, so in Chappie there is much reminiscent of Scott’s androids in Blade Runner, both can feel, both don’t want to “die”.  There’s also a little of the original Mad Max in the gangs Chappie ends up consorting with. All good influences. But this story is looking to appeal to a younger crowd, so there is more of a fairy tale element to it than in Blomkamp’s other films.

Yo-Landi Visser in Chappie

It’s still to be seen whether Blomkamp will reach the tech savvy young gamers with his tales of social justice but, in the process, we’re given a movie that fills the screen with seamless CGI, is visually stunning and tells the tales that need to be told, even if they don’t end with a happily ever after.


[Check out "Fresh Cuts" tab above to read about Cinderella and other recent films!]

A Growing Divide

It's no news that the Academy Awards are to the European film festivals what entertainment is to art in film. Still, expectations start with the New Year. This time the disappointments came as early as the nominations. We didn't even have to wait until the ceremony.  Most disappointingly, the Hollywood of old continues to run through the veins of the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.  Even in the year 2015 it can feel as if we're in the Hollywood of Gone with the Wind.

This year, however, they've been called out on it. (#OscarsSoWhite)

It’s not just about race, but that is certainly the best example of the disassociation of the Academy from the world that surrounds them. That only one black person is among the 20 nominees for the best acting categories in the year of the amazing acting in Selma, most particularly that of David Oyelowo; the year of Tessa Thompson who shines in Dear White People, Riz Ahmed in Nightcrawler, Chadwick Boseman as James Brown in Get on Up (given that this is a year of biopics) and many more who have been so unjustly overlooked.  In the Best Director category we have all white males, when the beautiful film that is Selma was made by the talented Ava DuVernay. It is a shame that the Old Hollywood continues its sorry track record: in the 87 years of the Oscars, of the 2,900 winners of the coveted statuette, only 32 have been black.

This is only one of the controversies to surround the Oscar nominations this year. Besides the snubs, there is the nomination of American Sniper in the Best Picture category. There has not been as divisive a film as this one in many years. But let’s put aside the polarization to which it has contributed and the more than $308 million dollars that it’s earned so far. Even if we overlook the fact that this film has overlooked facts, including the “little” issue of the non-existence of WMDs that led to the whole presence of American troops in Iraq in the first place; even if we pretend that the real sniper was like the Bradley Cooper sniper (the real one was quite racist); or imagine that the “dark” sniper, the Arab one, fabricated as contraposition to the good “white” sniper in typical Clint Eastwood Manichean style was actually killed by the “good guy” (he wasn’t); even overlooking all this, the film is still not nomination worthy. Who can dismiss the sloppiness (or should we say laziness?) Eastwood shows in this film? How will we ever not chuckle, for example, when we remember Bradley Cooper rocking those plastic dolls meant to be his babies? 

Eastwood is certainly Old Hollywood and knows how to pull heart strings in some moviegoers. In a Google survey on the Oscar Best Picture nominees, a whopping 42% voted American Sniper as the Best film, followed distantly by The Grand Budapest Hotel in second place and Selma in (honorable) third place.

My Two Oscar Favorites

No surprise that these three films favored by the Google voters are nowhere near being the front runners for the Oscars. That would be Boyhood directed by Richard Linklater and Birdman directed by Alejandro Gonzáles Iñáritu. One of the two will take Best Picture and the other Best Director. These films are the bland pudding to the fiery hot issues of the world we’re living today. Boyhood was an original feat, filmed over 12 years with the same cast meeting every four, so maybe, yeah, it deserved the nomination for originality. But it’s hard to not wonder why a film that shows a white, working-towards-middle class family living in Texas, where the population is 40% Latino, has no contact with people of color, except for the gardener whose life is changed by an off-hand remark made to him by the character Patricia Arquette embodies. A more “white-savior” moment is hard to find in film. And although the boy in this family drama has a sister, the film is all about him and as he grows, she fades, the point that towards the end it seems like he’s an only child. A more adequate and realistic title would have been “It’s All about the Boy (the White One)”.  The Academy members seems to relate. Patricia Arquette will probably win Best Actress, Ethan Hawke was nominated for Best Actor, Richard Linklater for Best Director in a film that, besides the 12 years it took to make, is otherwise quite unremarkable.

The Front Runners

Alejandro’s film, while made by a Latino filmmaker, is also far removed from the everydayness of people. It’s about an actor doing a Broadway play in New York, another city where about 60% of the people are of color, with another all-white cast. Not that every film needs to reflect the diversity of where it takes place, but, still! The film has a pretentious feel to it, that of someone trying too hard to make a “deep” story of the many times done script of a washed up actor who seems to have made the same mistakes most blockbuster actors of Avengers statute make in Hollywood: drugs, alcohol, infidelities, wasting away lots of money, bad relationships with family and kids. This time the old story is adorned with visual effects and even a drunk man calling out (in case you haven’t picked it up by then) Shakespeare’s Macbeth line about the “poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more”. I say no more.

Major Academy Snubs

The members of this Academy seem to be growing old locked up in their eternal ivory towers, holding tight to what they know best, which is always the safest thing to do. Only thus can we understand tomorrow’s probable Oscar wins. It is how we’ve come to accept that Argo could win over Amour or Beasts of the Southern Wild, or that The King's Speech win over Black Swan, True Grit or The Fighter. The Hollywood of old. That’s entertainment!

It’s not what people want in our very political and much polarized world. The divide between people of privilege and those without grows exponentially and rapidly (in old Hollywood terms: To Have and Have Not).  An excellent movie like Snowpiercer, that addresses this inequality, would have been a great addition to this year’s nominees, as would have Dear White People, which touches upon the issue of race in the 21st Century, or even Nightcrawler about our media and violence-frenzied world. But the Academy has played it safe once again. And this time it has lost.

More than Surviving. Celebrating!

Grand Budapest, Snowpiercer, The Hunt, Selma

When I began this blog two years ago in January I really didn’t think much about its future, but I don’t believe I expected to keep it up beyond a few months. The time that has elapsed since my first post is a testament to my love of film but, much more so, to you, my readers. By today’s standards, I barely have any at all in this mega ocean that is the internet. I am, however, thrilled to the bone that the posts I’ve written here in Kentucky have been read in such distant, wonderful places as are China, Russia, Australia, Turkey, Romania, Croatia, Saudi Arabia and many more.  I’m thrilled that I have readers in the US and Canada, as well, where so many movie blogs exist. In Latin America! This is the energy that fuels my writing, sharing this love of movies.

I have received encouragement in the form of comments. I’d love to receive more. We are growing in awareness that technology can serve as a tool of alienation, but it can also build conduits across continents and cultures. Art has always done this and now technology allows us to do so even more.

Also by means of this bridge-building technology, we are able to stream films from around the globe; a kaleidoscope of experiences that remind us of our fascinating differences and our surprising similarities. There is no doubt that they make us richer human beings. We’re also witnessing a rise in quite fantastic made-for-streaming television series. Like the serial movies of old that my father told me about, those cliffhangers that had people lining up outside the theater from week to week, there are now so many series that keep us hooked and impatient for what is to come. We have to wait quite a bit longer, but can then binge watch a season at a time.

But nothing, nothing compares to seeing a movie at the movie theatre and those are the ones I write about in this blog. I confess to becoming somewhat Walter Mittyish when I take my seat at the theatre. I get lost in the story and the wonder that is the film I am watching. I live so many emotions and lives. Yes, it is, sometimes, survival by film.

But now I am not only surviving, I am celebrating. Do I have any celebratory words on this, the second anniversary of my blog? I celebrate that there are still dazzling and daring films. I celebrate that Wes Anderson uses symmetry, specific pallets of color per film, and shot The Grand Budapest Hotel in three aspect rations. That Tim Burton keeps using the most fascinating camera angles and lighting, merging reality with fantasy, even as he’s making a feminist statement in Big Eyes. That Laura Poitras travelled to China to interview Citizen Four and opened our half closed eyes to the reality of corporate / government control. I celebrated that South Korean director Joon-ho Bong took us on the scariest and most dystopian of rides on the metaphoric train of class struggle, greed and our growing income inequality in Snowpiercer.

I celebrated that these past two years have brought us more movies by older, already beloved directors, like Michael Haneke’s Amour, the Coen Brother’s Inside Llewyn Davis, Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, Alejandro Gonzales Iñáritu’s Birdman, but also the new enthusiasm of films by newer directors, Ava Du Vernay’s Selma, Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station, Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, Damián Szifrón’s Wild Tales, Justin Simien’s Dear White People.

 Of course I could go on! But it’s all here, in these posts, in the shorter reviews of Fresh Cuts, sometimes in the Film News and Movie Quotes that exist because you read them. So thank you and Salud!

 

Pacific Rim, Fruitvale Station, Birdman

The Truth, Marching On

"How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?" Somebody’s asking, "When will wounded justice, lying prostrate on the streets of Selma and Birmingham and communities all over the South, be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men?"

(Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Address at the conclusion of the March from Selma).

Even if this past year hadn't been the year in which we were witness to the acquittal of police officers that killed unarmed black men and boys, Selma would still be a forceful call for a nation to re-examine itself on the ignominy that is racism. But it was that year, so this movie is tenfold an invocation to remember the struggle for justice and equality and to act against it, in the vein of the non-violent movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Oprah Winfrey as Annie Lee Cooper in Selma

Director Ava DuVernay’s film could not have come at a more important juncture in the history of this country, when fifty years after the march in Selma, Alabama for the right to vote, which is shown in the movie, this right continues to be threatened for people of color, to the point that the President of the United States’ Justice Department has filed suit against Texas and North Carolina to block voter laws that so discriminate. It comes at a moment when black boys and men continue to be profiled and justice continues to be “wounded”. There are still too many people in this nation whose right to decide over their lives and destiny is still at peril because of the color of their skin, and too many others that continue to live the lie that is white supremacy and the shame that is racism.

I confess that mine is not an impartial view of the subject matter dealt with in this movie. What’s more, I am quite a strong admirer of Dr. King. I have visited his birth place and where he now rests; I have visited the spot where he was shot, seen the rifle that killed him in body; visited the long awaited monument to this leader in Washington. I was, therefore, excited and at the same time apprehensive about one of the first major movies made about Dr. King and such an important moment in the struggle for equality. Would it do him and the movement he led justice?

I was, of course, very pleased to hear that the director behind this challenging task was Ava DuVernay, an African American woman director who had already won Sundance praise for her previous film Middle of Nowhere. I was curious to see why she chose British actor David Oyelowo to play Dr. King. True that they had worked together in her previous film and she was well aware of his talent.

Well, I can say, with much emotion that Ms. DuVernay’ film surpassed my expectations. This is a tremendous and transcendent movie that not only captures the complexity of what transpired around the march in Selma, but brings it to our days. There is no way to watch this movie without drawing the necessary parallels to what occurs today.

David Oyelowo emobies Dr. King to the point you feel you are in the presence of this great leader and not the actor who portrays him. We have seen enough videos of Dr. King to know who astonishingly well this actor has been able to bring him to life in this film.

It is maybe still an expression of hegemony that is present in the press that a “controversy” has arisen over how Ms. DuVernay portrayed President Johnson. With respect to this character, I would maybe concede that another actor, one with the thick, Texan accent that LBJ had, should have played Johnson instead of British Tom Wilkinson, but this is the only change I think could have been made. I think historians forget the legacy of this conservative democrat, too close to J. Edgar Hoover and too involved in sending troops to Vietnam for anyone’s liking, when they protest the film.  If anything, he is shown quite in the hero’s light when, standing before the American flag, gives his speech to Congress ending in with the protest song “we shall overcome”.

Tom Wilkinson and David Oyelowo

It is a moving film, as it should be. But it is more than just the subject matter that is dealt with. Everything in the film works well: the acting, the screenplay, the cinematography, and the score. It is a beautiful tribute to those that died for this struggle for equality, beginning with Dr. King; a remarkable portrayal of Dr. King in all his humanness; and a forceful reminder that this history is too recent to think that this struggle is over. 

Dr. King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King - Selma